2012/01/01

Information Diet Commentary, or Sniping At An Idea I Have Some Sympathy For

#1 Productivity Tip: Spend 10% of your time consuming and 90% of your time producing. Make more stuff. Watch less. Read less. Do.

Really, this is hard to argue with, but hard to follow, as Tim O'Reilly said.

So, I go around looking at more. While I think the author of Information Diet and I probably wildly disagree on key points of ideology, I would guess that I could find lots of points of commonality. I'll have to do some reading to decide that.

#2 Decentralise your media consumption
This is a bit of a heretical idea too - technology is geared towards central entertainment systems for our homes. But you know what? They are hateful, terrible devices. Ten years ago, if I'd wanted to listen to music, my flow chart would have looked like this:

Funny, in 2001 and before, my process for listening to music, more often than not, was:

OPEN WINAMP > CHOOSE A SONG > PRESS PLAY

I was and still am a computer guy at that time, and because I was coding and otherwise working on the PC, my stuff is by and large already updated to current versions. If the "now" case from Sciencepunk is every single time, iTunes must suck. But yeah, for the last 10 years, my CDs would get ripped and filed almost immediately, and I would listen to the original media rarely.
Let me contrast it with my listening to a CD in 2001:

EITHER GO TO MY WALL OF CDS (HOME) OR MY SMALL MOBILE COLLECTION > LOOK FOR CD > LOOK AGAIN BECAUSE WITH THAT MANY CDS, YOU NEVER FIND IT ON FIRST ATTEMPT > IF FOUND, INSERT CD AND PRESS PLAY, ELSE FAIL

And things like Google Music and Spotify make this much much easier. And never ends in fail.